Company of the Week: Vainu – Reason you should or shouldn’t join Vainu

Nowadays lot of people visit our office and ask how we’ve been able to grow so fast. The answer is simply that we’ve been great at recruiting – getting the right people in and keeping them. In the history of Vainu only a few people have left the office and not coming back. A cynical investment banker might argue that it’s not a healthy employee turnover rate – the goals and expectations are simply not set high enough if people are not leaving.

In some of the traditional cases, the investment banker might be right. But in Vainu, like in all cases alike, traditional models tend to fail. A real question to be asked is ”Would the company be different if any of the current workers wouldn’t be part of Vainu?” Our Head of HR is starting in the beginning of the year when we will approach 100 employees and questions like these will be more formalized. But I think it is important to reflect what kind of aspects are important to Vainu.

From business perspective that story is about acting as a change agent for organizations to gather and use data to transform it into more powerful and efficient organization.

Join Vainu!

Yes, I’m saying you definitely should, but I’m not saying that in all the cases you should. Companies usually embody themselves with core values and I believe big part of our DNA is that we want to act as change agents, also to ourselves. We are a different company every 6-9 months.

Vainu has found a market it is currently very strong at, a solution for data-driven prospecting, lead generation and sales intelligence. Along the journey, we are able to influence the rules of our industry while evolving it into something that we hope replaces the existing models. Without our courage to take risks – whether in technological design, promotions, recruitment decisions or simply having trust in our future growth – our future success wouldn’t be possible. Tuomas, our CTO, says it well: the technology we create today is made to become obsolete some day.

That is why you should or shouldn’t join Vainu. All of us have taken a risk when joining a startup. For some of us it’s meant giving up social statuses such as title, high salaries or position away for something new and exciting. For most of us it’s been starting a career in sales without really knowing what it takes to succeed. But the first step in succeeding in Vainu is the courage to explore something new in the price of giving away the old.

Will Vainu be one of the winners? To be honest, I can’t say for sure. But what I know for sure is that without a strong and diversified group of people we will definitely not be there. So it all boils down to recruiting and keeping the right people. The key is to have it as a ”strategic advantage”, or a ”must-win-battle” as the investment banker would reflect it in her memo.